Worlds of Magic Devs Try Sleight of Hand on Kickstarter Backers

Wastelands Interactive’s Worlds of Magic, continues to disappoint backers with the latest announcement of a mobile release for a different game. While a Steam version of the game was made available back in March of 2015, backers were promised access to a DRM free version as well as physical copies of Worlds of Magic. Sadly, the latest update does little to address this issue. The developers instead focus on the iOS release of similar game titled, Planar Conquest.

Fans are assured that Planar Conquest will feature similar gameplay to Worlds of Magic, but modified for mobile devices and potentially being a different franchise altogether. It’s a bit confusing as the developers don’t seem to be clear on this point themselves.

This has understandably left some backers baffled as to why the devs would be busy putting out new games when they still haven’t delivered on the promises they made during the original Kickstarter Campaign in May of 2013.

Original campaign? Oh that’s right, because even though they exceeded their funding goals with their first campaign, Wasteland Interactive wasn’t too proud to go back to Kickstarter about 5 months later to ask for more money. Their target this time was listed as $5,000, but they admitted they were trying to raise as much as possible to polish the game more before it launched. Veteran backers were even offered additional rewards they could combine with those earned in the initial campaign. All told the second campaign brought them an additional $34,139 to add to the £45,593 they brought in with their first campaign.

Conversion rates aside, this is not an insignificant amount of money, but fear not you can still pay $39.99 for the Steam version of the game. At that price point, Worlds of Magic should be standing toe to toe with some AAA titles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Based on user reviews and the Dev’s own promised relaunch it seems like this version is a bit of a buggy mess. While efforts have been made to patch and correct the issues, Wasteland seems to have settled on just redoing the whole shebang in time for the Q2 console release.

All of this still fails to address the issue of backers that were promised Worlds of Magic, sans DRM restrictions, who still haven’t even received a digital copy of the game. It was alluded that this was due to issues with getting the game accepted on GOG. Worlds of Magic has since been removed from the ‘Coming Soon’ section of GOG, so it would appear that whatever problems they encountered there were not able to be corrected. In addition, the physical backer rewards have been postponed until the PC release, which will happen, maybe around the same time as the console releases? Again, they aren’t sure.

At this point it would seem like Wasteland should allocate some of their funding towards backer fulfillment, as many are taking to the comment sections of both Kickstarter pages to vent their frustrations. It’s possible that the release of Planar Conquest really isn’t taking away time or funds from seeing Worlds of Magic finally completed. Unfortunately, poor communication and timing has left some backers feeling like they were tricked.

Joanna Mueller is a lifelong gamer who used to insist on having the Super Mario Bros manual read to her as a bedtime story. Now she's reading Minecraft books to her own kiddo while finally making use of her degree to write about games.

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